My friends had a Puzzle Party yesterday. We get together for a potluck dinner. The main group activity is a jigsaw puzzle of some kind, but people are welcome to bring videos or other games and activities or just sit around and chat.

I started the Puzzle Party thing a few years ago when I was really into Puzz-3Ds. I got the Castle Neuschwanstein (NOYSH-van-styne) Puzz-3D and invited a bunch of 8-10 friends over to assemble it. That took from about 1700h in the even to about 0300h the next morning. I got Le Château Chenonceaux a few months after that and we did the same thing. That one went until 0400h or 0500h. Then I got Camelot and Notre Dame Cathedral. Notre Dame was a special one in that, there's one piece with the silhouette in a window of Quasimodo holding a lamp. I gave out a t-shirt as a prize to whoever found that piece.

We've been into this puzzle thing ever since =)

We did a few regular jigsaw puzzles over the years. One year, B got a 6000 piece Old World Map. It was damned hard. That thing took us 3 months with a few people working on it for 6-8 hours almost every weekend.

B had received a Deluxe 10 Puzzle Set as a gift. It has two 1000 piece, three 750 piece and five 500 piece puzzles. We picked one that was a field of flowers. It was patches of different coloured petunias. It was kinda maddening that the picture reference they had was cropped wrong, so we were looking for pink edge pieces for one side, but the edge was really a a patch of green shrubbery. Gaah...

It was a lot smaller than I expected it to be. I laid out the corners and the edges across the table. Eventually, I realized that a lot of the pieces on the one edge fit together. By the time I had one edge completed, it was only 1½-2' across. =O

About three of us started the puzzle around 1930h/2000h. Some of the other people decided to watch videos instead. Sometimes, a group of people would decide to play Dominoes or a card game instead.